When it became clear she would never return to either of her two homes, I broached the subject of selling them, or at least renting them out. “I don’t care what you do,” she told me. “I can’t go back.” I had no qualms about selling the Manhattan apartment. It held no real memories for me. The cottage was a different matter. Not only did it hold a special place in my heart but also I was concerned that some boorish hedge fund manager would buy it, tear it down, and throw up some horrid modern mansion I would be forced to look at every day. So instead of selling, I bought it and, at her instigation, had it razed. Today it is an empty field, where wildflowers bloom in summertime.
We did, however, place a large rock, more like a boulder really, at the edge of the pond, near where she had scattered the ashes. It weighed several tons and needed to be put in place by a crane. A stonemason had carved in Harry’s and Johnny’s full names, the dates of their births and deaths, and an epitaph Maddy composed that read
i will love you always.
We also placed a little stone bench beside it, and she planted flowers around the base. Every day she went down there and sat for hours.
We were married the next year. It may come as a surprise, but it shouldn’t. She was healing, and, to me at least, it seemed the right thing to do. The only thing, really. I had proposed several times, and she always told me she wasn’t ready. She thanked me for helping her and wondered why it mattered anyway. We were already together and could we please just not talk about it? Still, I kept asking. I had my reasons, of course. Partly I believed that, if she married me, she would be better able to heal her wounds. But also I wanted it so very much.
There were practical reasons too. As her husband, I could visit her in the hospital. I could do things for her legally that I could not do as just a friend. Also, call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the proprieties, and if we were going to live together under the same roof, we should do so as man and wife. Eventually she relented.
We told only a few people. Ned and Cissy, but only afterward. There was no reception. The ceremony was held in the town hall, my groundskeeper and the golf pro from the club were the only witnesses. We exchanged rings. I handed over the check. Afterward, the two of us went to the movies. Maddy loves the movies.
We still slept in separate rooms. Sex was never an option. It would have been impossible for both of us after all that had happened. Nor were children—even though Maddy was too old, we could have adopted. But that was beside the point. It was enough for me that Maddy was now my wife. I know she agreed to this only out of a combination of apathy, gratitude, and fear. While she was recovering, she became unnaturally afraid of being alone. The thought of having to spend the night by herself was terrifying. We always kept a light on.
Fortunately, I was senior enough in my firm that I could arrange my schedule to accommodate her, as Maddy, in addition to being incapable of being alone at night, also refused to fly. As a result there were more than a few overseas deals I was forced to delegate to other members of the firm. I don’t blame her, but it was just one more constraint we were forced to live with.
It wasn’t all bad, though. There were good days. Maddy resumed playing golf, a game she hadn’t played since she was a child, when she and her father, who was a scratch player, won the father-daughter tournament at the club so often that they eventually just gave them the cup. Harry had never been interested in the game, finding it too slow, so she simply stopped. Her form was perfect, and she could hit the ball as far as any man. She could have been very happy playing thirty-six holes every day, starting early in the morning and going hard until evening, regardless of the weather. I am an indifferent golfer at best, despite taking lessons since childhood, but I was happy to play for Maddy’s sake.
She didn’t care that she was better than I. It was enough for her to be concentrating on the ball, the wind, the green. She even enjoyed the comradeship of fellow golfers, and we often made up fours with other members, or she would go by herself if I was unavailable. Her beauty, athleticism, and the air of mystery around her made her quite a compelling figure at the club, of course, and at first we were deluged with invitations to cocktail parties, dances, dinners. We politely declined every single one. Small talk on the golf course was one thing, in someone’s home it was another entirely.
One of the worst times of year for her began when the club closed the course for the season. To help her feel better, I eventually bought a place in Florida in the same club north of Palm Beach where my parents had once had a house. There were still a few elderly women there who remembered them. The house, a pink stucco one-story Spanish Colonial with a swimming pool, a bedroom for each of us, and a little apartment over the garage, was right on the golf course.
We began spending more time in Florida, taking the twenty-five-hour train ride down to West Palm right after Thanksgiving and staying there through April. That’s where Maddy began to socialize again and became more animated. By now, her hair had grown back, but it was not as long, or as golden, as it once was. She still never cooked, but we began to accept a few invitations, and she began to enjoy going to the golf club or the main club at night for dinner. These were new friends, people not associated with her past life. Many of them were happily illiterate. The books on their shelves, if they had any, were spy novels for reading on the beach, manuals on how to improve one’s golf game, a few hefty biographies that may never have been opened. They also had the usual assortment of coffee table books with lush photographs of architecture and gardens. It would have meant little to these retired bankers, lawyers, and CEOs that Maddy had once been married to Harry Winslow, the author. This allowed her not only a welcome anonymity but also a chance to start over. In this world, she was only Maddy Gervais, not Wakefield, not Winslow. I won’t say she was happy, but she was in less pain, and for that I was extremely grateful.
Gradually, she began to come back to life. It had started with golf and continued with that other great Sunday activity, going to church. After Maddy came to live with me, I had fewer and fewer opportunities to attend Sunday services. I gently asked her if she had any desire to go, but she declined, saying bitterly, “I don’t think God would care to hear what I have to say to Him.”
Then one Christmas she agreed to join me. We hadn’t attended a Christmas Eve Mass together in years. We were in Florida, and Christ Memorial Chapel was wearing its holiday best, festooned with garlands and wreaths, a manger in the corner, the choir in their surplices, red candles burning in every sconce. It was the “midnight” service, which meant eleven
P.M
., and the church was full of people in their Christmas finery, lots of red and green neckties, their seasonal cheer buoyed no doubt by a good dinner. Sleepy children dozed on their parents’ shoulders, old ladies sat together.
The rector greeted us warmly at the door. He read the traditional Christmas Eve service in a warm Scottish burr, while children playing the parts of Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, and the three kings acted out the story. We sang hymns, and I was very pleased that one was a favorite of mine, “The Holly and the Ivy.”
Afterward, as we were driving home, Maddy said, “I forgot how much I liked going to church. Can we go again on Sunday?” So we returned the next week and then every week following. When we were on Long Island, we also went. And while I remained purely a Sunday goer, Maddy started taking Bible classes, and before long, she had graduated to community outreach programs. She worked on clothing drives, served in soup kitchens, visited people in the hospital, and delivered food to the elderly. Eventually she became a member of the vestry.
By now, I had more or less retired from the firm, a decision that had been one of the easiest of my life. I kept an office there still and went in from time to time, but mainly for distraction because there was little for me to do except sign the odd paper and peruse the
Wall Street Journal
. Maddy and I didn’t need the income, of course. In addition to my money, Maddy still had her own trust, which I now looked after. She also had the money from the sale of her homes and from Harry’s books, and, for the first time in her life, she was really quite rich.
Sales of Harry’s books surged after his death, and, after much dithering, a movie came out based on his second. Thanks to the inclusion of one of Hollywood’s more bankable stars, the film performed relatively well at the box office. We were, of course, invited to the premiere but inevitably declined. Maddy had no desire to see the movie. I snuck out to see it one afternoon and found it mildly diverting, but it was nothing like the book. Still, I couldn’t help but think how much Harry would have enjoyed seeing his book made into a movie even if he might have been disappointed with the final product. I know he certainly would have appreciated the money. His agent, Reuben, had been after Maddy for years to share the draft of his last book in case there was anything salvageable. But she made sure that no one ever saw it.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I did read it without her knowledge. One of my responsibilities in the aftermath of the accident was to settle Harry’s estate, which also meant removing his belongings from the rental apartment. There hadn’t been much, but there was his laptop. Everything else I had boxed up and sent into storage, but I kept the laptop. It was not too difficult to figure out his password—it was, incidentally, “Maddy”—and this allowed me to find and download his novel. He had several hundred pages in the most recent file. I gave Maddy the computer, but secretly I kept a copy of the novel for myself. I did so out of curiosity. She was still so fragile I didn’t want to do or say anything that might upset her.
It was a good book—better in many ways than his last. It was all about us, although it wasn’t really about us. I suppose that’s how writers do it. There was a happily married family, a handsome husband, a beautiful wife, a sweet boy. They were loved and admired. There was even a family friend. Into this idyll comes a young woman, beautiful, sensual. But she is not a snake in the garden. She is smart, full of life, eager for love. There is an affair, followed by heartbreak and remorse. The descriptions of their first night, Paris, all the trips they took, the time they spent together—things that only the two of them would know were there. That is why I know so much. Harry wrote it all down. What was different was that the story ended well. The husband and wife were reunited. It was a story of forgiveness. Some readers may have found such a conclusion unrealistic, treacly even, but it made sense to me. It was, as he told me the last time I saw him, a “love letter” to Maddy.
I never told Maddy I had read Harry’s last novel for fear it would cause barely healed wounds to burst open again. I could not bear for that to happen. But it did make me curious. There was much I hadn’t known, that none of us, except for Harry and Claire, knew about their affair. But every year, again without Maddy’s knowledge, I reread the manuscript, hoping to glean something new about Harry’s feelings for Maddy, his feelings for Claire. There was a certain masochistic pleasure in doing so, of course. While I was only a minor character, it was strange to read about myself, even if it was supposed to be fiction. Is that really me? one asks. Is that the way I talk? Is that how Harry—or any author—really sees it? One doesn’t know whether one should be insulted or flattered, or both simultaneously. What seems important to one person is peripheral to another. Still, I went back to the book every year, immersing myself once again in those prelapsarian days and then the inevitable fall.
Much of the writing was quite beautiful too, at least it struck me that way, because he caught their life, our lives, making them so recognizable and yet so much more. There were certain words, passages that gave me chills whenever I read them. But, like all secrets, after a while it became too much to bear alone. I had to share it with someone. Obviously, I could never discuss the book with Maddy. Our golfing friends would be incapable, and even old friends like Ned and Cissy, whom we did not see that much of any longer and who were minor characters in the book, would have merely been sounding boards. I needed to share, but, more important, I needed to know more.
There was only one thing to do. I contacted Claire. Nearly a decade had passed, and she wasn’t easy to find, but eventually I tracked her down. She was surprised to hear from me, of course, but was good enough to agree to meet me for lunch. She was living in Old Greenwich now, and asked if we could meet somewhere near Grand Central because she would take the train right back out. The only place I knew in the vicinity was the Yale Club, so I suggested that.
W
hen the day comes—I make sure to cover my tracks with Maddy by telling her I have a big client lunch, of which I have fewer and fewer nowadays—I enter the club for the first time in months and am greeted by Louis at the front door. “Welcome back, Mister Gervais,” he says. “I hope you had a good winter.”
I am early and wait for her downstairs in the lobby. Her train was scheduled to arrive shortly after twelve-thirty. A few minutes before one, she walks through the door. Her hair is longer, her face not as fresh as it had once been but still beautiful, the almond eyes, the pillowy, slighted parted lips. It is late April, and she wears an elegant gray coat over a subdued but well-cut fawn-colored, knee-length dress. She is a little heavier, but her legs are still good. I spot on her left hand a wedding band and a good-size diamond.
I stand up to greet her. “Hello, Walter,” she says, putting out her hand. “It’s been a long time.”
“Yes, thank you for coming in all this way.”
“Don’t mention it. I’ll take any opportunity I can to get down to New York.”
“How long have you lived in Old Greenwich?”
“Four years.”
We go up to the rooftop dining room. It is quieter, more intimate than the boisterous Tap Room. I recognize several of the members sitting around the room and nod to them. The maître d’, Manuel, is also pleasantly surprised to see me. I shake his hand warmly, and he shows us to our table. Would we like anything to drink? he asks.